That represented a huge $45 billion (£34 billion) increase just since January 1 2018. At the moment, his net worth is thought to be a little over $134 billion (around £103 billion).

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Jeff Bezos owns at least six houses that, all together, are worth close to $84 million (roughly £65 million).

This includes two mansions in Beverly Hills, California, two family homes in Medina, Washington, and a rather large 30,000 acre ranch in Van Horn, Texas, which is the state where Bezos was brought up.

His blistering net worth figure places Bezos far ahead of tech giant Bill Gates of Microsoft fame, who is the second richest person on the planet with a fortune of $93 billion (nearly £72 billion).

It’s worth pointing out however that Bill’s fortune would probably be much bigger if he hadn’t donated billions to charity through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which he helped to set up.

Jeff Bezos and his soon-to-be-ex wife MacKenzie (Image: Rex)

The richest woman in the world, Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, is an heiress to the L’Oreal cosmetics fortune. At the time this was written, she was worth $49.4 billion (over £38 million), which places her in around 10 place on the gender-neutral list of richest people.

However her place as the wealthiest woman might be under threat, because, after 25 years of marriage and just six months after Jeff Bezos became the richest man ever, he and his wife MacKenzie announced that they were going to get a divorce, and there’s no telling what kind of settlement MacKenzie could be in for. With that in mind, Bezos might not be the richest man in the world for much longer either.

In a statement on Twitter, Bezos said that, ‘We feel incredibly lucky to have found each other and deeply grateful for every one of the years we have been married to each other. ‘If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again.’

Recently, Bezos published a blog post that seemed to expose an attempt by the owners of the National Enquirer, an American Tabloid, to blackmail him using nude pictures that they allegedly had of Bezos, which he’d sent to his girlfriend, TV presenter Lauren Sanchez.

He goes on to say that: ‘Any personal embarrassment AMI could cause me takes a back seat because there’s a much more important matter involved here. If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?’